


Good Enough

by greygerbil



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 17:51:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4929349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John meets an eccentric friend of Sherlock's who's found himself on the side of the angels - for now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Enough

John was busy keeping three overstuffed bags of groceries from spilling all over the floor when he rounded the corner and saw a stranger standing in his kitchen. He was holding a severed, frozen hand.

“You’re John,” the man said.

John looked at the expensive suit, slicked back hair and leather loafers. MI6? CIA? A colleague of Greg’s who was playing some inner-departmental game and looked for leverage against Sherlock? He could barely think of an institution with any legal power in this country (and quite a few foreign ones) that wouldn’t have some good reasons to put cuffs on Sherlock. He wondered if he’d be trialled as an accessory.

The three hands currently residing in the fridge were not going to help them in court.

“I... am,” he said, haltingly.

“No worries!” The man’s voice hitched up dramatically, just for a moment, and evened out into a childish sing-song. “I’m not here to cause any trouble.”

Smiling, he waved the frozen hand and placed it back in the fridge with its companions. With a frown, John considered their containers.

“Yes, those are your grandmother’s soup bowls they sit in. Sherlock didn’t want them thawing onto the shelf.”

John was so used to Sherlock reading his mind now that he needed a moment to realise he hadn’t actually voiced his complaint.

_Christ, it’s another one of them._

“Are you a brother of Sherlock’s?”

The man giggled.

“ _You_ must’ve met Mycroft.”

“Yeah. Yeah, felt more like I... was met.”

“That sounds like good ol’ Mike.”

Finally, John remembered to set the bags down and work on taking off his jacket. If Mycroft often passed for a normal man because he frequently wanted to be mistaken for one, and Sherlock was generally seen as an eccentric because he really didn’t care much what others thought of him, this man seemed another few steps closer to where genius and madman met. John tried to ignore his unsettling grin.

Before John had a chance to get a word in, Sherlock strode out of his bedroom into the kitchen.

“Now that I think about it, didn’t they recently discover some Wall-Sun-Suns?” He asked, clearly continuing another conversation. “Hi, John.”

The man grimaced like Sherlock had stepped on his feet. “Have you ever had a look at them?”

Fishing his phone out of his pocket, the stranger typed something and held the phone to Sherlock, who took a brief look, considered, and shook his head.

“Well, that’s obviously nonsense.”

“Computation errors due to overclock,” the man said by way of explanation.

“Figures.” Sherlock nodded his head.

“Wall, sun, suns?” John asked, just because he felt like he had to or it might resurface without prior warning in the form of some explosive in his jacket three weeks from now and Sherlock would complain that yes, of course he had warned him, didn’t he remember?

“For Donald Dines Wall, Zhi Hong Sun and Zhi Wei Sun. Also called the Fibonacci-Wieferich prime,” the stranger said.

“Oh, of course, if you put it like that,” John muttered and considered where to place the butter in the fridge so it wouldn’t feel quite so tainted by rotting human flesh.

“Maths is a bit of a passion of mine,” the stranger said with a coquettish smile. “Sherlock humours me.”

“Right. So, who are you now?”

“Ah, yes, I haven’t introduced you. John, meet Jim, my boyfriend.”

John fumbled the milk and boxed it against the open fridge door to keep it from crashing to the ground.

Again, Jim giggled affectedly, like a school child.

“Sorry, what?!” John asked, turning to Sherlock.

“ _Obviously_ you’ve heard me,” Sherlock said with a brief smile, put down the water boiler to do its job and strode by him to fish the tea out of the grocery bag.

“Has Sherlock kept me his dirty little secret?” Jim asked.

“He hasn’t mentioned you with a word.”

“Please, you’re already overwhelmed with your own love life. Mine is going fine, so it doesn’t merit constant discussion.”

John took a deep breath.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Jim.”

“And you. I’ve heard _so much_ about you.”

That toothy grin again. Someone so short and slight shouldn’t look that dangerous while simply standing in John’s kitchen playing with an empty test tube, but John’s old soldier instincts were going off like a flare.

“I wish I could say the same. How long have the two of you been... ?”

It was still too strange to think of Sherlock as anyone’s _boyfriend_.

“Darling, is it four years now?”

“That depends on whether you consider the three times I interrogated you in Mycroft’s prison the beginning.” Sherlock put the kettle with the tea down to brew and glanced briefly at Jim from the corner of his eyes. “Which of course you do.”

“Best first date of my life,” Jim said, beaming. “I’ve got the Iceman to thank for that.”

“The Iceman?”

“Oh, I _love_ nicknames,” Jim said. “I used to call this one the Virgin when we first met,” he pointed at his boyfriend, “but then I took care of that, so now he’s just Sherlock.”

John had to grin. He caught Sherlock’s displeased gaze in return.

“Prison, yes? I guess my first meeting with Mycroft was actually mild?”

“You hadn’t just screwed up one of his MI6 operations in the Middle East,” Sherlock argued.

“A boy needs a hobby,” Jim interjected.

“Mycroft captured Jim after he foiled a top-secret mission two years in preparation for no other reason than to see what would happen,” Sherlock said, sounding entirely too appreciative. 

“I _let_ him capture me,” Jim huffed.

“He says otherwise.”

“He thinks otherwise. Doesn’t make him ri-ight,” Jim answered, stretching the last word to the breaking point and pitching his voice high again.

Lulled by Jim’s childish ways before, John’s suspicions came crashing back full force now.

“If that’s your hobby, what do you do for a job?”

“Since Afghanistan, I work for the Iceman. I lead his Spec Ops division.” Jim smiled. “You don’t think he would let someone like me just live if I hadn’t worn his leash, do you?”

“Don’t be pretentious, Jim. You knew that would happen. Afghanistan was your version of a job interview,” Sherlock pointed out.

His last words were almost swallowed by the front door banging open. In came the tallest man John had ever seen, most of his skin covered in tattoos, or scars, or both. A handgun hung at his belt, barely concealed by his coat.

“You ready to go, sir?” 

A slight frown creasing his brow, Jim waved his hand like he was chasing away a fly. 

“I _told_ you I’d call you if I was, Sebastian. Off you go.”

With just a shadow of fear flashing in his eyes, the man left. Sherlock picked up the kettle again.

“What happened to your old henchman? Uh... Leonard?”

“Not even close. You never remember their names,” Jim chided.

“I don’t see how they matter. So what was it?”

“He was preparing to double-cross us.”

“That happened quicker than I thought it would.”

“He was always fishy. Fun for a while, though.”

With an exaggerated sigh, Jim turned down Sherlock’s silent offer of a tea cup with a shake of his head. “But I suppose I shouldn’t make your brother wait too long. John.” He nodded his head. “It’s been a _pleasure_.”

John had about a hundred questions, but there was none that he wanted to ask in front of the man Mycroft used to beat his no doubt fearsome Special Operations unit into shape, so he went for an obvious one.

“Likewise. One question, though. If you’ve been together for four years, why didn’t _you_ move in with Sherlock?”

Again, Jim revealed too much of his teeth as he gave an incredulous laugh. Sherlock snorted at just the same moment.

“Move in? We would try to kill each other by the end of the first month,” Sherlock said.

“Give us another week on top of that, and one of us would have succeeded.”

“Yes, me.”

“Keep believing that,” Jim chirped. He took hold of Sherlock’s shoulders to pull himself up into a brief kiss. “Goodbye, dear.”

Sherlock put his hand on Jim’s hip, a gesture so intimate for his standards that John found it downright surrealistic to contemplate.

“Keep yourself alive.”

Jim took his coat from the hanger with an elaborate movement which John could only describe as a flourish, the fabric flowing. “No promises,” he said and vanished, pulling the door softly shut.

John listened to the creak of his footsteps on the stairs, a habit he had picked up from Sherlock, and waited another good minute after they were gone.

“Your boyfriend’s job interview – did that get people killed, by any chance?”

“I should hope so,” Sherlock said with infuriating, condescending calm. “If my brother started imprisoning people for trifles, that could have devastating consequences for the national well-being.”

“So Jim’s a murderer.”

Sherlock blew on his tea. “He works for Mycroft, doesn’t he?”

“It doesn’t bother you, going out with someone like that?”

“Not at all. Nobody’s perfect, John. Maybe your high expectations are why all your relationships crash and burn in under a month.”

John turned away, fists curling and uncurling. Shouting at Sherlock never worked. He’d tried. Often.

“Yeah, of course, I guess my standards are pretty high. I’d like to not date a killer.”

“I wonder,” Sherlock said thoughtfully.

“I’m pretty damn sure I can promise you that. What will you do if _he_ ever looses it? Obviously morals can’t be his strong suite.”

“They aren’t. Me and Jim both know that I will probably have to hunt him down when he inevitably goes rogue at some point. And he’s smart – if we plays his cards right, he could beat me. Theoretically, obviously. I won’t let that happen.”

Sherlock smiled and John sank into the armchair.

“A ticking time bomb. Brilliant. What do you see in him?”

“He’s the most interesting man I know.”


End file.
